Posted
by
Soulskill
on Monday February 21, 2011 @02:19PM
from the it's-finished-when-it's-almost-finished dept.

Several readers have sent word that Motorola's Xoom tablet, marketed as the iPad's first significant competitor, won't ship with Flash support. Quoting:
"Support for Adobe's Flash technology has been an argument for the Android operating system since Apple CEO Steve Jobs notoriously said that Flash is a dying technology and that it won't make it onto iOS devices for several reasons. Flash support appeared in Android with version 2.2 and Google even flaunted it as a killer feature for tablets running Honeycomb (3.0), like the Motorola Xoom. But it looks like Adobe and/or Google have yet to put the finishing touches on Flash's implementation in Android 3.0. An advertisement for the Xoom on Verizon's site says (in 6 point text at the bottom) that Adobe Flash support on the Xoom is expected in Spring 2011, meaning this functionality won't be available at the launch of the first Honeycomb tablet on February 24. Considering how slow carriers and manufacturers are when it comes to software updates, this Spring 2011 update could mean more like late Spring 2011 ETA."

The real problem I have with the Xoom is that you have to sign up for the cellular data plan in order for the tablet to enable WiFi [engadget.com]. No Verizon data plan? No WiFi for you, either. Sure, you can cancel after the WiFi's been activated, with a minimum of one month data service... but still, that's just outright extortion. And there's no release date on the WiFi-only Xoom yet, so it's the cellular-enabled Xoom or nothing.

this is like an alternative historical fiction... we get to see what the personal computer revolution would have looked like if telecoms drove it, rather than computer makers, hobbiests, small pc building companies, and end users.

sad that consumers are getting so used to the carriers driving what computers they buy know.

The real problem I have with the Xoom is that you have to sign up for the cellular data plan in order for the tablet to enable WiFi [engadget.com]. No Verizon data plan? No WiFi for you, either. Sure, you can cancel after the WiFi's been activated, with a minimum of one month data service... but still, that's just outright extortion. And there's no release date on the WiFi-only Xoom yet, so it's the cellular-enabled Xoom or nothing.

Looks like it'll be a US-only thing, same as with the iphone. The rest of the world should be just fine.

There isn't a firm release date for the Wifi one, but we only learned a hard date for the 3G/4G model until about a week before it ships. All the pundits have been saying the wifi model will ship in March or April at the latest. It won't require a dataplan. If you're opposed to paying for 3G data, then why pay $200 more for the 3G model?

You don't need to spend $800 to get performance which would be entirely adequate for watching videos, browsing, reading books. An Archos 101 satisfies the things most people need from a tablet for a price which is 3/5 of an iPad. The Nook is cheaper again. I would hope that there will be android 3.0 tablets with beef up specs hitting those price points before the year is out.

There is no avoiding that the Xoom is way too expensive. It makes the overpriced iPad look like a bargain. Perhaps it's all a cunni

Maybe Motorola is doing the right thing. From what I've heard Flash on Android hasn't been ideal. I've never used it but if I were to guess, Motorola may be waiting for Adobe to fix/correct/optimize something first.

Flash isn't evil, it's just abused. When you load a page and it has 3 or 4 flash ads and every tab in your browser is the same your computer is going to have a hernia. Some people pretend this is Flash's fault but the reality is that if pages were serving up the equivalent workload in HTML5 performance is bound to be even worse. At least the Flash plugin can spawn threads, do background rendering and so on. Everything in HTML5 on the same page will be competing on the same thread (web workers could potentially handle some load but nothing DOM related).

The remedy is to use an ad blocker so you can pick and choose what content to receive. In time I expect Ad Block will be used as much to curb the abuses of HTML5 as it is for Flash now. Assuming HTML5 ads aren't inlined and obfuscated which is a distinct possibility.

Yes, and people are continuing to _choose_ a device that they know won't run Flash.

(I find it very funny that this new device won't have Flash at launch, and Windows Mobile won't have copy/paste, two things that people hugely mocked iOS about at certain times.. Why aren't these competitors making sure they have these alleged huge superiorities fixed at launch??)

Or, the only things which run well on small underpowered devices are things written natively for them. html/js has awful performance across mobile devices if you're doing anything more than laying out a simple page, and maxing the tiny processor drains the battery quickly whatever.

Flash is write once - deploy nearly anywhere, it doesn't match the speed or economy of a native app. html/js is not really production ready unless you can exclude anything but the latest browsers from requirements ( hard as som

Honestly, Flash is nice to have but not the be-all end-all that some have made it out to be. On my Android handheld, flash is almost all advertisements. On my iPad, I've been able to stream Netflix, Yahoo clips, YouTube, and WSJ videos with no problem. Somehow they've worked around the no-Flash limitation.

As a side note, I love my new iPad but some spouse or daughter is going to inherit it as soon as one of these awesome Honeycomb tablets comes down to my price range. iPad is great, but a bit too closed for my tastes. I'll just have to suffer a few months longer...

If you keep your iPad (or buy a new one), don't count on keeping your Netflix or Kindle apps. Apple is demanding that they sell their movies and books through Apple, and hand over 30% of the revenue. Apple is threatening to pull the apps if they don't get their way. It may end up that you will give up your Netflix streaming if you stay with Apple. Both Netflix and Amazon have annouced that they will release Android versions of their apps this year.

If you keep your iPad (or buy a new one), don't count on keeping your Netflix or Kindle apps. Apple is demanding that they sell their movies and books through Apple, and hand over 30% of the revenue.

If you read details of the new subscription model [tuaw.com], Apple clearly says: " . . . when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing. " So if you currently have a Netflix account, Apple gets nothing. If you sign up for a new account through Netflix, Apple gets nothing. If you sign up for Netflix through Apple, Apple keeps 30%. Will Netflix go for that? It remains to be seen, but details matter.

Frankly, I hope that Apple gets slapped down by the FTC over this. Taking a cut is one thing, but requiring equal or lower prices is quite another and is obviously and blatantly anticompetitive.

You can say that's anti-competitive for Apple but the reverse means it's anti-competitive for Amazon. If Amazon can say that prices for Ebooks bought through Apple will be higher than Ebooks bought through Amazon (even though it's the same book), who's being anti-competitve? Apple is saying if companies want to use their infrastructure, they can't up the price.

Amazon makes a ton of money selling lots of books through their store. They have the market clout to get great prices and they keep their overhead low with their warehouse-like store. Apple has a nicer store where people will suggest books and be friendly and they make a little money. Sony makes a little

Your analogy would be structurally closer if all three owned malls. Remember, Amazon and Sony have their own businesses. Amazon sells music and books as does Apple and Sony. Sony sells electronics and computers some of which compete with Apple. Amazon sells other goods but sells both Sony and Apple goods. In other words, all three have a very complicated arrangement where they partner and compete with each other at the same time. The bottom line is if Sony or Amazon want to sell in Apple's store they

I think that, in large part(aside from specific niche/legacy stuff that is simply "flash or nothing", which is comparatively rare but very important to certain buyers) Flash is more of an issue for runners-up.

Because Apple has a fairly impressive chunk of the desirable customers demographic and a strong no-flash position on their iDevices, many outfits who were previously content to use flash have had to adjust. However, many of them have just churned out an iDevice-specific app that wraps their web cont

What this is the fact that apple and other devices have H.264 decoding chips embedded in the hardware. H.264 doesn't require a flash container. You'll find it a lot of places as a.m4v in a mpeg 4 container. For video that is all Flash is was a container. It just happened to be the container that was nearly universal for both mac and pc for many years.

For pure *tube cases, it is true that Flash is essentially entirely unnecessary. As you say, it just does decode on an mp4 or flv video pulled from a URL, and provides a few basic play control widgets(and typically ads...).

On quite a few sites, the URL for the video file is clearly visible in the page source. You can even rewrite the page on the client side for HTML5 video with some basic greasemonkey or equivalent. Annoyingly, enough sites do a little bit of obfuscation/screwing around with referrer URLs

That's a fee for marketing and distribution. I'm skeptical that we consumers would pay 30% less if developers all had to manage their own sales, marketing, and distribution channels. The evidence so far indicates that we can expect to pay 60% less on apps delivered through the app store, despite this 30% fee.

So, while DRM is generally obnoxious, it is not nearly so bad when it is not used to artificially restrict the devices that I can watch it on (e.g. as with Kindle or anything Apple).

How does forcing video to HTML5/H.265 artificially restrict the devices you can watch it on?

That's a fee for marketing and distribution. I'm skeptical that we consumers would pay 30% less if developers all had to manage their own sales, marketing, and distribution channels. The evidence so far indicates that we can expect to pay 60% less on apps delivered through the app store, despite this 30% fee.

Amazon claims to take 30% (that's slightly off as I understand it, but good enough for our purposes) and give 70% upstream. Now Apple wants 30% of the whole, which is equivalent to Amazon's cut. Amazon can increase the cost by some amount in order to make any money whatsoever on the sale, or they can completely eat any in-app purchases (hoping that extra-app purchases make up enough to keep the whole thing profitable) or they can stop distributing their Kindle app.

That's great for Apple, which gets to implement their 30% tax and block stuff for whatever strategic, political, or moral reason they like, but that is bad for:

Let's be clear here. Apple keeps 30% of revenue for apps sold. This pays for the payment processing (including the credit card processing fee) as well as all the infrastructure involved. If the developer does not charge for his/her app (and many of the ones above do not), the Apple gets nothing. As for subscriptions, the new model is this: Apple gets 30% of subscriptions if Apple is the one that originates the subscription. If the subscription already exists or was initiated through the content provid

So content providers have three choices: 1)Keep prices the same for both tiers and do not make as much money on Apple's subscriptions. 2) Raise prices across all subscriptions or 3) Do not do business with Apple. Whatever the choice they decide it's up to them to make a choice. But also remember that Apple only gets the subscriptions cut from the subscriptions they generate. Subscriptions not generated by them are not charged.

You seem to be confused. Apple aren't trying to put a "30% tax" on video embedded in web pages, they just don't support the (buggy/unreliable/battery draining/whatever excuse) Flash plugin on the iPad. You're free to watch videos using any other container, just not wrapped in an outdated proprietary plugin that was originally designed for putting vector graphics on web pages.

It's sort of a bummer if the first honeycomb tablet wont support one of(if not the) largest video sites. After all, that used to be a selling point. I know there are hacked together solutions that convert content "in the cloud" and push to the device, but thats got limited support.

If YouTube is dependent on Flash, how do you suppose my iPhone has been viewing YouTube videos from Day 1 (and the iPad has done likewise)? YouTube's video is encoded as MPEG-4. Devices using Flash using Flash to decode and play the MPEG-4. Devices that can directly play the MPEG-4 just do that. This isn't rocket science to understand.

You are kidding right? Smart Phones have had a YouTube app for years and now YouTube has an HTML 5 mode that supports h.264 or at least did and they are adding WebM support.So the answer is a simple no it isn't.

What you naysayers dont forget is that the mp4 encoded video is wrapped in a flash container.

The apps you speak of either transcode from the flv or extract the mp4(depending on the device) I've used apple, motorola, samsung, nokia, ZTE and Blackberry devices and none seem to access the full youtube library. Some devices default to m.youtube.com which is even more limited. Explaining this to my family, friends and customers is always trouble. Average people just want stuff to work. Those apps do not always

I have a Galaxy tab. The dedicated youtube app works fine, but running flash within the browser brings the whole machine to a halt for many seconds.
As a result, Vimeo is pretty much uselss and they don't have a dedicated app yet (just a buggy fan-made app).

So what you're saying is that from your first hand experience, Flash on Android sucks. From my perspective, it's been about 8 months since Flash on Android has been released and they still haven't gotten the kinks out yet enough for it to be usable. I remember when Jobs made the argument nine months ago that Flash for mobile just was not suitable. A lot of people here on slashdot responded that that Flash for Android would prove him wrong. In your opinion, do you think that today Jobs was more right or the Flash supporters?

considering that it will be another 2-3 years before flash on android/arm is stable enough to actually use, and the current version has many limitations.(not all flash features are actually supported enough to run).

I would say Jobs is right. The underlying hardware is changing far to fast for Adobe to keep up. Adobe's 5 year development cycles just don't cut it in a market that changes every 6 months.

Adobe releases a new major version (x.0) of the Flash Player every 18 months, and that cycle is getting shorter with each version. They release minor versions almost weekly. But don't let the facts get in the way of your hatred. That's twice now.

That's inconsistent with my experience. I run flash on my Galaxy S and find it to be just fine for animations and video. There are no problems with the load time. I do notice that activities like scrolling and zooming become 'choppy', but that hasn't killed my experience. I expect my mobile device to be a little less snappy when viewing video. To compensate, I just set Dolphin to display Flash content only when I want to see it. I then have the choice to view the content or not. I appreciate that.

Motorola has been quite bad about promising updates and not delivering. See here [motorola.com] for a list of broken promises. Especially glaring was the failure on the Cliq XT. A year of "we're testing it" followed by "we just couldn't do it". Never mind that the phone ships in Korea running 2.1, never mind that custom 2.1 firmwares work flawlessly, they just wanted to sell new phones. I know Moto is just another big corp doing what big corps do, but eff them, I (and all the non-techies that ask my advice) won't be buying Moto anything again.

I would not say Samsung is pretty good. The Moment has several software issues that have never been resolved by Samsung but can be fixed by rooting and updating to "enthusiast" builds.I was so soured on my Moment that when I could I updated to the HTC Evo. While I wished it have a stock build it is a very nice device and is running 2.2. 2.3 is supposed to come in March but until I see it I don't believe it.

Say what you will about Apple but they do support their devices properly for a good ~3 years or more in most cases. The only way I'd buy an Android device is if it was fully unlocked so I can update it myself using stock Android firmware and still have 100% functionality, otherwise you know you're going to get screwed (not if, but when).

You've given a reasonable case against Motorola. Who do you recommend (for Android)? Who has a good track record of delivering what they promise? Perhaps more importantly, who has a good track record of supporting updates for phones that are no longer being sold?

I have a Motorola Droid, and I've had no problem because I've just rooted it and installed my own upgrades. My bigger concern with Motorola is their trend of attempting to DRM lock the bootloader to prevent rooting. They make it harder for us t

I have a couple of mobile devices with purported Flash support (Nokia N900 and N8), and while they play video and handle "click" ok, they don't do mouseover, dragging, and other things that makes anything besides video viable. The one device that I saw that supported these advanced features did so by creating a virtual cursor that you moved via arrow keys -- terrible.
When Apple decided not to support Flash, this was one of the justifications, and in my mind, the only truly legitimate one. Until Adobe redesigns flash with some sort of drag or gesture support, it's always going to be a poor experience on mobile devices.

To be honest, I've never heard of a firmware update coming from Motorola. All I hear is excuses. My L6 and Quench (aka Cliq xt) never got their update, so I'm basically a sitting duck for malware in Android. The L6 was trusty, but the Quench is full of bugs I'll never get fixed. I'm just waiting for Cyanogen Mod to add support to the MIB501 to erase the crap out of that phone.

How many(if any), native applications are you using that are iDevice-specific implementations of a web property or game that is otherwise flash based? If nonzero, how many of those also have an Android equivalent?

That is why Apple can spit on flash, while Google is getting cozy with Adobe... Apple knows that, for the present at any rate, they have the install base sufficient to drive people to develop platform specific applications for them. Android has fewer platform-specifics, which makes Adobe's ability to(imperfectly) make available the vast legacy base of Flash stuff all at once attractive...

In the long term, Flash is almost certainly fucked. Apple and Microsoft both have competing native environments and development tools in which they are strongly invested, and which are defaults on their platforms. Google is less overtly hostile; but their native environment also isn't flash based, and their web products are pretty aggressive about advancing native HTML/JS and using those where possible. Adobe has the advantage of well-entrenched design tools; but their flash runtime has no platform of its own, and the world isn't quite as friendly as it used to be... Short and mid term, though, there is a huge body of legacy and current stuff that they can offer to platforms with weaker native application bases.

If(and only if) Apple adjusts their strategy as needed, I would say that what they are doing is (while rather nasty) quite pragmatic. They could hardly have had a better position from which to induce the production of iOS-native applications, favorable network effects, and customer lock-in than they have enjoyed since the iPhone release. They would have been foolish to turn that down by spending their time obsessing about whether it could support Flash, and Java(

Yes, we know how very well that strategy played out for Apple in the past, when they were the leaders and competing with cheaper but open and standard alternatives...
The thing is that it depends on what one calls cheaper and open and standard...

If you are talking about standard, Apple did not compete with standards, they used standards while other standards evolved around them to compete with Apple. For instance Apple used the RS242 standard for many interconnects. It was well understood and easy to im

As far as I'm concerned, the life of one of the workers in his sickening factories, is worth ten times more than his pathetic evil ass.

Steve Jobs is probably an asshole in real life as stories suggest, but, let's be honest: Foxconn is not one of his factories. Apple like Dell, like HP, like many other manufacturers contracts Foxconn to manufacture their products (sometimes in the same factory). Apple could have been more inquisitive about the working conditions of the people who make their products but there are not alone in this regard that they were not aware. In fact, I don't seem to recall that any other manufacturer promising anyt

If they don't audit then they can't know that anything is wrong so nothing needs to be improved and only Evil Apple was so vile to observe Foxconn and force the conditions and suicides into existence solely by that act.

i wonder if western governments know about that argument - it might be convenient when it comes to providing support for foreign regimes that do horrible things like torture and murder their citizens. hey, you could call it Realpolitik...?

Many times the complaint about western governments is that they impose their morals and customs on other countries. In this case, the western custom of an 8 hr work day must be adhered to is being advocated by you.

Also the problem was the number of suicides, not murders. Out of the hundreds of thousands of workers that Foxconn employs I think there have been 20 reported suicides. I don't to belittle the deaths of those who died, but that's a very small percentage considering that the two major plants of

i always wondered why it was that people talk a lot about globalizing free trade......but you don't hear so much about globalizing human or labor rights.

No the problem is you're complaining about a problem when you don't understand the definition. You are complaining that working long hours is some sort violation of labor rights when it isn't. Working 8 hours a day is only the Western ideal of work day in the US only. The French consider anything over 35 hours a week to be long. These are cultural differences in working hours. [wikipedia.org].

so, if conditions are so bad in a factory that people kill themselves in numbers then we shouldn't impose our standards onto them (especially if it's not financially expedient to do so.) Ok.

No you have to understand that the knee-jerk reaction of "OMG factories in China are evilz" only show you don't really know what

So far I read: workers worked long hours (sometimes 12 hours a day). And they didn't like their jobs because it was repetitive. There were some additionally restrictions like not talking. Some of the dormitories had cockroaches (like my old college dorm). And there wasn't running water (which isn't uncommon for China). Their bosses yell at them. They wished they got paid more. They can't afford the things they make.

The sad reality of their situation is that they wish they had better lives with mo